Hong Kong Computer Society - enterpriseinnovation.net

BACKPAGE ROBERT CLARK
Take the social media challenge
Your avatar needs a dress code
Miley Cyrus has closed her Twitter account so she
can keep control of her personal life.
Gartner has called on businesses to take control
of their employees’ avatars. The US has introduced disclosure
rules for bloggers. The Singapore government is considering
them.
Tidy avatars
It looks like the end of the go-go years for social media and
Web 2.0 in general. Web 1.0 was about people getting online,
and Web 2.0 is about making the user an essential part of the
experience. Now it’s reality-check time as we bump up against
the limitations of 2.0.
Gartner forecasts 70% of businesses
will have virtual world behavior
guidelines by 2013
One sign: celebrities who joined the Twitter craze because
everyone else did. But Miley decided to put some distance between
her and her impressionable demographic.
Gartner’s signal is enterprise-oriented. Second Life might be
strewn with abandoned avatars, but avatars on IM clients and
into business environments and will have far-reaching implications—from
policy to dress code, behavior and computing
platform requirements.”
Even virtual worlds will soon become important enough
for businesses to take them seriously. Gartner forecasts 70%
of businesses will have virtual world behavior guidelines by
2013.
Netopia 2.0
The new rules in the USA requiring bloggers to disclose commercial
interests don’t affect business bloggers, but they’re a
We’ve been here before. If you can remember in the early
bates
about whether the Net even needed any rules at all. Vow-
I’ve ever heard), Netopians warned of the dangers of allowing
big business and government interests to invade cyberspace.
I remember a decade ago coming across an opinion piece
forecasts of the great digital future, or tips on how to set up a
Web site, today they dispense earnest advice on how to deal
with the social media world.
an online dress code.
The social media curve
The use of social media is already advanced in Hong Kong.
The local association of interactive marketing says 32% of
panies—Facebook
and Xanga are the favorite social networking
sites.
If you’re a CIO you might have worked with the corp comm
guys to set policies for company bloggers. Now someone has
stay on top of what’s being said about your organization on
Facebook or Twitter and be able to respond, whether via company
blogs, the media, customer mail outs or some other. Your
corp comms colleagues are going to need more help.
with the market in terms of sharing information, fast-tracking
problems, and responding to questions.”
If yours is an FMCG company you’ve surely already feeling
the heat. If your business has a footprint in mainland
complex, but just as important—bad
news travels fast across tight-knit industry
groups.
Companies like Trackur, Jive Software,
and Backtype offer various kind
of online reputation management or
tracking tools, although not yet in Chinese-language.
For CIOs, staying ahead of the social
media curve is a bit of a stretch from the
traditional role. But then, so is everything
else the CIO does these days.
Robert Clark is
a Hong Kongbased
technology
journalist.
rclark@electricspeech.com
58 Computerworld Hong Kong Nov 2009 www.cw.com.hk